The present invention relates to a module for automatically establishing an optical communication link and more specifically the optical communication link being established between an optical communication apparatus and an optical access point.
In present day data centers, server units are connected to the data storage units via switches, the switches managing the data traffic. Usually servers, switches, and storage units are connected with each other by cables (e.g., via fiber or copper cables). The possible data transfer rates for cable-based communication between computing entities can be between 2 and 20 Gb/s.
Data centers usually house large numbers of racks that are populated with servers, storage systems, network components, and other equipment to operate the data center. To connect the components with each other, a variety of cabling models and architectures are deployed in data centers. Basically, there are two major use cases for cabling scenarios, which are the cabling across multiple racks, rooms, or even different data centers, and the cabling inside a single rack. A rack installation can contain several components, such as servers, storage systems, Ethernet switches, fiber channel switches, and others. Each server and storage component is connected with Ethernet cables to the internal Ethernet switches and with fiber channel cables to the internal storage area network (SAN) switches.
However, with an increasing number of individual racks that are connected using cable, the cabling scheme becomes increasingly complicated.